Event driven architecture is an emerging software infrastructure designed to support a real-time method of integrating application processes. Many software developers have favored the event driven architecture to construct highly dynamic, adaptive and extensible systems. In event driven architecture, events are largely defined by their meaning to the business and granularity. Events may occur throughout existing applications. For example, a database update may be a meaningful event for some business while the successful completion of an order process may be an event for other business. A key aspect of the event driven architecture may be a notification delivery.
In many event driven systems, software components that send notifications need to know that each notification they send has been handled by all interested parties (other applications) before further proceeding. As a result, the software component may not perform further operations while it is waiting for dispatched notifications to be handled by interested parties. Sometimes, an advertent “notification cycle” may be created when the notification is sent to the software component which is also a listener of other software components. In order for an event driven system to make progress without unnecessary delays, an advertent “notification cycle” must be avoided and the software component must not block for an unbound length of time waiting for a notification to be handled by all interested parties.
Therefore, it would be desirable to provide a method for time bounding notification delivery for a software component in an event driven system. It would be also desirable to provide a method for preventing the software component from waiting for notifications from other components for an unbounded time.